La Belle Dormant
by Psyche Blue
Summary: Once upon a time her name was Meg. But she had names before that. And one, back before, before she was all thorns. The name she can't remember - the name from when she wore this meat last. The meat she wakes up wearing, all alone in a cornfield, in the spot she sold her soul so long ago.
1. Chapter 1

**This is a continuation to my other story 'Once' in which I made up what I take to be Meg's backstory. She may seem a little OOC, as I'm taking into account...well...what happened in 'once' and why happens in this story. Thank you for reading! **

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_Her mouth is…heavy. _

_Asleep. She's been asleep. _

_Odd. It's heavy. Weighed down. And her lips are dry…so dry they are cracking. _

_Bleeding. She can taste it on her tongue. _

_It's salty. _

_Her eyes are shut but there's a light making the lids red, revealing little splotches of colour dancing in the half real world of closed off vision. A burst of something – yellow, in fast dissolving pin pricks. Is she seeing colour? Or is it all in her mind? Blue bruising in a corner of her vision. _

_Blue. An important colour, she thinks. She remembers – blue. _

_Her eyelids are heavy. Too heavy. There is a pain in her finger – a small, infinite pain. A bite from a – _

_A what? _

_An…ant. Maybe. Yes, an ant. _

_She calls the image to mind. _

_An ant. _

_There's something brushing against her. Something around her. It makes her pant in sudden fear. All around her, crushing her, something sharp and rough. She moves in panic and feels a lance of pain in her belly. A sharp ache. And tender, flinching flesh on her cheeks, throbbing away from her movement. Bruises, maybe, and swollen lips. Cracks across her cheeks – from – fists? _

_The sun is hot. _

_She opens her eyes. _

_It burns. _

'Hey - stop the car Alex!'

'What? Samantha, what-'

'In that field. There's a girl in that field.' Alex looks to where the other woman points.

'Christ.'

She stops the car and Samantha reaches for her handbag, with it's first aid kit, calling on all the training she can remember from that course back in uni. Recovery position, keep the neck steady, CPR if necessary, she's yelling at Alex to call 999 as she scrambles over the fence bordering the field, her girlfriend close behind her, already on the phone. Samantha skids down the slight slope, and starts to push her way through.

The girl is lying in the middle of the wheat field – Samantha wouldn't have seen her if it wasn't for the height of the Landrover Alex drives.

Even as she rips through the corn she's considering the odd position of the girl. Legs tight together, arms out on either side – almost as though she's been laid there. Deliberately. She is covered with a fine patina of…dirt? Dust?

And she's naked and there is blood between her legs and her face is covered with bruises and Samantha's stomach turns with the horrible implications of this grisly sight.

She expects the girl to be unconscious. Dead. But when she skids to a halt beside her and kneels down, the stranger's eyes are open. Panicked, they are fixed on a point in the brilliant blue sky, for all the sun's so bright it must burn blindness. The girl's chest rises and falls quickly… as though she's having a seizure. A fit.

'Are you alright?'

Samantha tries to make her voice sound calm.

But the girl doesn't respond, doesn't shift from her position, spread in that odd crucifix of bruised and battered limbs.

Samantha swallows.

'I'm Sam. Samantha.' She shrugs of her cardigan slowly, so as not the scare her, but the girl doesn't seem to notice. Gently, Sam leans over to cover her with the cardigan.

'Get away from me!' It's more a scream than words. Samantha leaps back as the girl writhes away, tumbling in the corn the same colour as her hair.

'Sam, are you ok?' Alex, coming behind her. The girl looks up, sees the taller woman, hisses almost like a cat and scrambles into the thick wheat.

'Stay away!'

'It's ok.' Alex says.

Samantha finds she can't speak. The girl's eyes –

Oh God, her eyes.

They are very large and very green. But the – terror. The fear.

The wounds. Inside that glassy pigment.

The girl pants, moves her head, panicked - more animal than human. She's muttering something.

'It hurts. Heavy. Heavy – attached.'

She stops her movements. Too suddenly. Almost like she's been hit. 'No.' She whispers.

Alex crouches down. 'Give me your hand, sweetheart.'

The girl ignores her.

'No.' she says again, and, oddly, looks down at herself. At the body covered with blood and bruises. Brings up her hands – and there is real, true, bone bruising horror in those eyes of her.

'No! No no no no no no no!' She touches her face, and the cry comes out again – as though it's tearing the lining of her throat. 'Not this. Anything but this! Not fucking this!' Then she's stood up – too too fast, for someone with flesh as mangled as hers, and she's running away from them, an off, lurching run, stumbling and falling and sprinting through the wheat

Samantha stands and takes a few steps – not sure whether to follow, what to do, how to help.

They watch the girl stagger away– clambour over the fence, fall to the ground and scrape the skin from her bruised knees. She gets up, and they see her legs bleeding – missing patches. They start to run, then.

The girl stumbles to their car, looks in the rearview mirror. They see her, even from their distance, touch her face.

There is a moment. An awful, mangled, mutilated moment.

Of silence.

She fixes her reflections eyes, and, with shockingly peaceful clarity, strokes her own cheek in horror.

And then she hits the glass. Once, twice, again, again, panicked, frenzied, smashing her fists against the little mirror as though she wants to pound it into fragments. Screaming.

But by the time they've reached her she's stopped, and she's lying on the ground, an awful, low moan sobbing out of her.

'Not this.' She gasps. 'Not this. Not this, please, father, my god, not this. Please.

Not this.'


	2. Chapter 2

They sit her in the car as they wait of the ambulance to arrive.

She's lost all of that manic energy of before, allows them to wrap the picnic blanket around her, bend her arms into the sleeves of a cardigan. As Samantha buttons it up she looks at the girl's face, brushes her hair out of her eyes – tries to give some kind of human comfort.

The girl ignores her. She's looking at something neither Samantha nor Alex can see. Samantha sits beside her while Alex paces the road.

The girl looks young. Only about sixteen. And all that blood….Samantha just wants to run her a bath, to sponge away that filth, like she does for her nephews when they're covered with mud and scrapes.

But, as Alex pointed out, when Samantha started to tip water out of a bottle to wash her face, there could be evidence under all the…mess.

Samantha doesn't want to think about the type of evidence.

Occasionally she tries to speak to the girl. But she's in such shock that she doesn't respond – to anything, even the scream of sirens when they near.

There is one thing which makes her eyes flicker though – a bee, landing on the warm metal of the car. She looks to it for a moment and her lips part a fraction.

Then it flies away and she's left with that empty look again.

'What I don't understand,' Alex will say later, as they drink in the pub of the closest village 'Is how she got there.'

'What do you mean?' Samantha finds it hard to talk. She keeps wanting to cry.

'I mean that there weren't any tracks in the corn. Leading to her. It's as though she…she fell from the sky or something. Or pushed her way out of the ground. But the way she was positioned…someone did that. Without leaving any tracks. Any trace. I just…I just don't understand.'

Samantha looks over to her and catches her hand, interlocking their fingers.

'Come on. We're too drunk to drive and it will be late by the time we sober up. Let's book a room.'

Too much. It's too much – she can feel them, feel the thoughts rolling in her head, being tugged out of the brain tissue – it's making her ache. And the roughness of the hospital gown – wearing away at her. She's losing skin flakes. She can feel it.

She can feel everything.

Smell, too – such smells. The turgid stink of disinfectant, old vomit, somewhere, underneath.

In the police station, the liquid they had used to clean the floor. Someone's lunch – salmon, a smell that stuck to the lining of her throat.

Her mouth hurts. From all her earlier words.

She won't do that again.

Sounds are too loud, they twist together- she can't make sense of them. They are all a drone. The odd word, the occasional bite of sense.

And the accents. Not familiar – alien.

She tries to think.

One person – the most similar. The voices make her think of him - a short man with dark hair and a mocking smirk.

A bad – feeling.

Colours merge together. The world is a patchwork full of pins before her.

The colour.

Blue.

Blue as the sky, bitterblue, bright blue, true blue. Blue, sadness and salt, and somehow heaven.

She holds on to the colour blue.

The nurse watches his patient dig her fingers into the flesh of her palms.

She draws blood.

There is no DNA on the girl except her own.

And so many things which make no sense to the police, the doctors, the two women called in for questioning again the next day.

How did the girl come, trackless, to the middle of the wheat field?

Why was she covered head to toe with dried dirt?

Why is there no record of a missing person fitting her description – why will she not speak not tell them her name? Why does she turn from mirrors, from the glint of reflection as though she's been burnt?

And why the bruises, the cuts, the mutilations?

Why the signs of just having given birth?


	3. Chapter 3

Your name your name your name your name. They are a stuck record.

They should be silent.

One beast – so many heads.

And her skin. She wants to rip it away. She tries to but they stop her, drug her, lay her in bed and her head spins and she thinks she might faint from this _feeling_.

Claws at her throat. Is she could, she would tear apart the brain inside her skull, to stop the dreams coming, feel it crumble between her fingers, rank and thick and fleshy. Stinking.

But her hands are heavy.

She can't.

Her sister. Smelled of milk when she was little. Soft. Blue eyes – burned to the heart.

Her sister, lying on her bed, weeping, bruised, broken.

Stop!

She judders, bites her mouth till it bleeds, fights the clawing hands of sleep.

The priest. Paler eyes than her sister, less bruises – more…sapphires. Glowing. Precious light – rare.

Her sisters shut eyes. Dead.

Her fault. Hers. She couldn't – clawing at the door, trying to stop her husband as he dragged her baby sister, her little sister, her barely monthly bleeding sister to his bed, screaming through the solid wood, hurling herself against it, again, again, again.

Stop!

Blue – true and pure and heaven.

Enough. No more. No more! No more no more no more!

The nurse runs to the room – calls for help – the girl sits bolt upright, hands over her ears, screaming high and loud and unthinking, a siren wail of a scream.

Relentless.

They drug her and she sleeps.

In between the thudding lurches of the time when she last wore this skin, there come the other memories.

Memories of the fire. The rack.

Her teachers hands, in turn twisting inside her flesh, then gently cupping _her _hands, showing her what to do, to make another writhe.

Her father, who sold her to her husband. Her real father, the one who chose her, the one she bound herself to the wreckage of flesh she let him make of her, so he could remake her in his image. The father who had yellow eyes and kissed her on the mouth so hard he bit out blood.

Her new god. The one who would not leave her.

Calling for Annie. Sister, Annie, are you here? Are you here?

Until she forgot the name.

Her new father promises a god to grant her heaven with her sister. But she cannot remember (will not will not will not remember).

Sleep. Dream. For a hundred years, maybe? Or just one long, biting night.

Thorns around her.

She dreams of thorns.

Sleep.

Sleep, dreams – they are alien. Unnatural. Make her feel sticky.

No food. No food. She doesn't need it – shouldn't.

They make her eat, so when they leave her she slip slide staggers her way to the bathroom and shoves fingers down her throat.

The taste of vomit – burning, acidic.

But her stomach clenches painfully after five days of this, and her face under her fingers is gaunt. So she eats the hospital food – as fake and sterile and manufactured as everything else here.

They give her an apple, and she gets the giggles, even though she can't say why.

She won't speak to them, and eventually they leave her to her hallucinogenic limbo. She lies in her white sheets, hand pressed over her chest, fingers digging in to her skin. She aches at the judder-thud, then rush of blood, feel it froth about her body. Feels herself – every tiny hair, every skin flake, every healing wound, each knot of tendon. Bunched toes, stretching, slack legs, the swells of her breasts, the curl of her eyelashes. In revolted fascination she lies on her bed, and touches the skin of her cheeks.

It is wet.

She still won't look in mirrors, though.

The kind nurse brings her a book of fairy tales. She flicks through them, fingers tracing the briar roses of the sleeping castle. She lingers on the thorns.

Memories surface. Remind her who she is.

Was.

She doesn't want to.

Sometimes she goes to the window. The sun of the day they found her has gone, been replaced by fleckling rain. She likes it. It is a comfort.

She tries to open the window, but its locked.

So she presses herself against the glass, and tries to breathe it in – wills it to soothe her burns.

The other patients on the ward look at her oddly. She has to share, now she's stopped screaming.

One day, as a nurse brings her lunch, she speaks her first words.

'What is your name?' she asks.

And does not know why. Except that this nurse is kinder than the others, and gives her special smiles, and flicks through channels for her to try and find something she wants to watch on the hospital tv – so many of the channels are taken up with desolate pictures of the world's climate – all hurricanes and floods, or else cattle deaths, or outbreaks of some odd disease, at least in America.

So she asks the woman for her name – and the nurse blinks, surprised, almost dropping the tray – and for some reason she can't fathom the patient lurches forwards from her bed to try and catch it.

There is a breathless pause.

'Phoebe.'

The girl nods her solemn head.

'What's yours?'

So many names. The first one, which she tries not to remember. Then Kate, at one point. Alfonso. Daisy. Elizabeth. Walter. Pearl. Rebecca. Meg. So many – more than these. They crowd at her mouth.

She shakes her head.

They ask her more questions, which she ignores.

That night she gets up, and pads her way to the bathroom. She flicks on the light – it beams sickly yellow, swelling out the room. She walks to the sink.

Looks up.

Her face in the mirror. Thinner than she remembers, cheeks gaunt from all those fingers down her throat. A slightly upturned nose. Thin lips in a wide mouth. She opens it, revealing somewhat crooked teeth.

Last time she breathed she was prettier than this.

But was that really breathing?

Her eyebrows, never plucked, are thick and darker than the vast quantity of corn gold hair tumbling about her shoulders.

She examines her eyes, last.

Very large. Thick, dark lashes.

The irises – very pure green. Glass green. Clear green. The only striking part of her.

She bites down the panic rising in her throat.


	4. Chapter 4

The next day they take her to the garden. It's a small, rather desolate affair – flagstones with a bench, bordered by sickly looking plants in various stages of withering. An empty birdfeeder swings forlornly from a bare trellis.

Hunched over in the gentle, unrelenting wind, Rose (Meg? Kate? _Sam_?) walks in a circuit around the space. She untucks her folded arms and bunched fingers only to brush slightly against a mildewed rose as she passes.

She does another circuit.

And another.

The birdfeeder clatters against the trellis in the wind, and a few disheartened drops of rain flick from the clouds. They strike her cheeks, and she feels them push against the surface cells.

On her sixth circuit she thinks of Lucifer, and her father's eyes, and a strange, short shudder of feeling comes over her.

She goes again, the next day. And it is grey.

And again and again as days judder past, wounding as they go.

She nightmares her way through the dark – a rack, the bone burn of hellfire, a demon with red eyes driving in the knife, an angel in a hospital gown.

Twisting her fingers, watching bodies writhe, a new father.

A new god, brining with him staining benediction.

Annie. Annie. Annie. Annie.

America. Says the television. Pandemics. Chaos.

And on the seventh day she stops her circuit.

She goes and kneels by the rose bush in the grey grey day, holds the stem until the thorns are buried in her hands, and a warm trickle of blood runs down her arms.

'Are you alright?' A man's voice. She ignores him.

'Girl?' a hand on her shoulder. She tries to shrug it away but it stays put, so she must turn around to meet the man's eyes.

They are kind, if a little weary, and the face they ornament as brown and creased as a walnut.

'Go away.' She whispers. She had fire in her voice, once, but it's burnt out of her, left scorch marks where it died.

He shrugs.

'This is the only garden. So no, I won't, if it's all the same to you girly.' He goes and sits on the bench, limping with a walking stick. When he's seated he rests his hands on it, and watches her with dark eyes.

She does her best to ignore him.

'There's a sparrow above your head.' He says, nodding towards the bird.

The girl's mouth hurts.

'Horrid thing.' She rasps. The man shrugs.

'Even horrid things are worth noticing.' He reaches inside his trouser pocket and pulls out a lump of bread, holding it out to the ragged bird. The girl snorts her disgust, but the old man ignores her.

'You'll never get it over.' She points out, a little snidely, and turns back to her rose.

'I wouldn't be so sure about that.' He calls back, merrily, and she whips her head around to see the bird perching on his hand in a flutter of wings, and tearing at the bread.

Without thinking, she untangles her hands from the spikes.

'How did you do that?'

He smiles at her, and his eyes melt into cheerful creases.

'That's for me to know, girly.' She tries to look disinterested, but cannot prevent the flicker of her eyes to the bird perching on his hand. Eventually she gives up on pride, she watches with unconcealed wonder. He grins again at the way the wide eyes, the parted mouth, make her seem so clean, so young.

She wraps her arms around her legs, and stares at the man and the sparrow, until the nurse comes to scold her for the ragged mess of her hands, and lead her back to her room.

So she no longer circles the garden with the lost obsession of the menageried animal. Instead she seats herself, again and again beside the rosebush, and watches the old man.

The television begins to blare out fears in America. Epidemics spreading of some unknown disease. The doctors and nurses hurry, terror leaching out of their overworked heads. The girl made of thorns and soot watches them quietly, presses back the memories hissing in her ears.

Sometimes the man in the garden speaks to her – tells her that the rose she used for mutilation is called rosa rubiginosa. She doesn't talk back much, but he doesn't seem to care.

After the hospital drag of days has blurred into one skeaning grey tangle, he tosses her a lump of bread.

'Hold up your hand.' Almost without thinking, she does so. He scowls at her.

'Higher, girly.' She holds her arm up, ramrod muscle stretching straight. He smiles his approval at her worried mouth.

'Now shut your eyes.'

'Why?

'So I can call them over for you.' She closes her stinging green eyes, and for one moment is plunged into that hapless world of half sleep.

Then she feels something.

A myriad of tiny claws. On her hand, her arm, even – yes, one on her shoulder, twittering.

She opens her eyes.

She is a kind of holy mess of small grey bodies, small and screeching away.

The girl laughs, throwing back her head of golden hair.

The sun peaks out from behind the English cloud, and makes a sudden gilded stain upon the garden.

That night she dreams about blue eyes, and the memory sends sudden painful pangs across her body, makes her wake and pant out heartbreak to the night.


	5. Chapter 5

Riots. Chaos, outside the grey, tranquil, sterilized world of the hospital, with its concrete garden and collection of twittering birds. They will probably throw her out soon. She finds she doesn't mind much.

It's only the end of the world, after all.

She's dreaming through this madness, somewhat numb, as though thick skin surrounds her, masks her.

She only feels something when the man doesn't come to the garden, and she asks for him and the nurses say they don't know who she's talking about. And he doesn't comeback, and she's left with the sparrows she's learnt how to tame, just her in her hospital gown, shaking in the cold English autumn, whilst the rose wilts and droops and drops, leaving only tender thrones.

The world, she thinks, as she sits in the rain, is falling apart.

She dreams about blue eyes, and they leave her aching, so she tries not to sleep, drifting around the steadily emptying wards. Soon enough doctors and nurses don't bother to even come to the hospital that patients start to die in their beds – the elderly lie in their own filth, a loan baby sets out a desolate wail through the empty, wrecked corridors. Mobs burst through, smashing windows, greedy fingers snatching medicine, wires, weapons, anything. The girl sits on her bed in the now empty ward and waits for them to come for her.

They don't.

She goes to see if the baby is alright, but it's been taken.

After a few days, those who can leave have, and those who can't are dead.

She patrols the corridors of corpses. Occasionally the light will catch her green eyes, and make them slicker over to black.

What am I?

She asks it of the hunks of rotten flesh inhabiting the hospital beds.

What am I?

The broken heart monitor remains silent.

What do I do?

Is her God risen? Is her angel safe?

Who was I, once upon a time?

She has slept for so long, she thinks. Dreamed a hundred lives, between back then and now. Tried to dream another word into existence.

She thinks of twisting thorns, winding their way around her fingers. With a judder she feels them tighten, opens her eyes, sees where her fingernails have dug into the flesh of her wrist.

Sees a crimson rose, blooming there.

She will have a new name, now.

Dreams of thorns and a blue so blue it bruises, burns.

So long in dreaming.

'Rose.' She spits on her filthy hand in an unholy baptism, cleans a salt track from her cheek. It has scarred.

'Rose.' She repeats.

The hospital gown flutters, yellowed and greyed from wear, rank with sweat. Her feet are calloused from her bare footed wanderings.

She steps out of the hospital, into the ending world.

Hair a mess of gold around her head, eyes sharp, limbs trembling in their encampment of ragged polyester. Fingernails ripped to ribbons – not clipped. Mouth bitten all into bits.

Rose steps out.

Time to wake up.

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**NOTE** - to everyone who has read this story- thank you so much! I know not much was explained - if you read 'once' you can see meg's backstory as i imagined it. I want to write another instalment featuring a more in character meg and explaining the logistics of what's happening, including cas and the boys. if people think this is worth my while please review to tell me! Thank you for reading! :)


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